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Paper short abstract:

In South Sudan, human-elephant relations have often been antagonistic. Yet enmity with elephants also entailed recognising their equivalence with human enemies. Enmity was both constitutive of and constituted by interspecies connections and encounters, in which elephants played an active role.

Paper long abstract:

Elephants have often been depicted as gentle giants in international media and conservation imagery and as the vulnerable victims of the ivory trade by its critics since the nineteenth century. This vulnerability seems all too evident in South Sudan, where elephant populations have been decimated for ivory and meat during the past half-century of armed conflicts. Yet those who can remember elephants describe them as anything but harmless, recalling their capacity to crush and mutilate human bodies and to ‘make war’ on people and crops. This paper argues that we need to understand these antagonistic dimensions of human-elephant relations, not only to expose the broader, well-established disparities between international conservation and local communities, but also to appreciate the complex, ambiguous meanings of elephants in human cultures and more-than-human histories. Making enmity with elephants also entailed recognising their equivalences with human enemies, conveying both opportunities for honour and spiritual risks in their killing. Comparisons with elephants could be made to praise human strength or criticise human power: ‘When elephants fight, the grass suffers’, is a popular saying in South Sudan. The paper will argue that human-elephant enmity paradoxically increased interspecies connections and commensurabilities, and complicated rather than simply facilitated elephant-killing. These ambiguities also connect different cultures, as the paper will show by drawing on nineteenth and twentieth-century European elephant-hunting accounts as well as South Sudanese oral histories, folk-tales and songs. It will emphasise the agency of elephants as well as people in shaping the nature of enmity.